There Are Two Kinds of People

Skylight at the Golden Theatre

(L-R): Bill Nighy and Carey Mulligan in Skylight.

            The revival of Skylight, the 1996 David Hare play, currently running at the Golden Theatre through June 21^st, is an extraordinary production of an extraordinary play.  It is exceedingly well-written, well-staged, and astonishingly well-acted.  It is deeply sad, frequently funny, and enormously significant.  Besides all that, it is thoroughly, deliciously British, which is just icing on the cake.

            Mr. Hare, known as the most socially conscious of the playwrights to emerge from the Thatcher era, is of course at his best here with the story of a schoolteacher, Kyra (Carey Mulligan) in a blighted area of London who is visited in quick succession on a snowy night by the adolescent son, Edward (Matthew Beard) of her former lover and employer and then by that lover himself, Tom (Bill Nighy).  Tom’s a wealthy restaurateur who plucked Kyra from obscurity almost fifteen years earlier and made her something of his personal ward.  Kyra began living with Tom’s family and, eventually, carrying on an affair with Tom that lasted six years until Tom’s wife, Alice, found out, resulting in Kyra’s tearful and seemingly permanent exit from the good life.  Now Alice is dead of cancer, and Tom, depressed and uncertain, is looking for reconciliation.  Kyra, for a number of reasons, is not so sure.

            Director Stephen Daldry (also represented this season with The Audience) is the patron saint of the London transfer, and he does not disappoint here.  Before a Wes Andersonian Cornell box of a set designed by the greatest scenic designer alive, Bob Crowley, he utilizes movement to a degree rarely seen in such a talky play.  Mr. Daldry is, clearly, an actors’ director, and he is instrumental in bringing out the beauty in their performance of Mr. Hare’s impeccable lines.

            It’s a gorgeous script, important not just for its 99% vs. 1% social implications but for the unceasing, beautiful flow of its language, whose Albeean conversation-play influences are clear and wonderfully implemented.  The best kind of plays that erupt in arguments (as this one does, quite frequently) give equally verifiable positions to all parties involved, and Skylight does so in spades.  As quickly as Kyra comments surgically on Tom’s callous behavior during his wife’s illness, he fires back about Kyra’s inability to develop personal relationships.  After one of Ms. Mulligan’s longer speeches, in which Kyra pillories the cowardice of conservatives who criticize social workers, the audience applauded, but they don’t get the point of the play.  Tom’s viewpoint is not villainous, it’s just different from Kyra’s.  This play doesn’t exist purely to make a political statement, it entertains, too, by juxtaposing two wounded souls and forcing us to ask ourselves whether love truly does conquer all.  In this arena Mr. Hare is, clearly, a master.

            The reality of the characters created by all three actors (all Tony-nominated) is staggering.  Matthew Beard, who made his stage debut in this London production of Skylight before it transferred, seems at first ungainly and overly loud, but he quickly makes it clear he belongs firmly in the class of promising young British actors captained by the dynamo Alex Sharp, of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.  Both are mobile and intelligent, and both dominate their scenes—Mr. Beard has only two, one at the very beginning and the other at the very end, but he makes the most of them.

Carey Mulligan makes the earthbound, alternately maternal and venomous Kyra a vibrant and real presence.  You can see why Tom fell in love with her.  Mr. Hare has a tendency of making the women in his scripts less people than symbols, and he doesn’t entirely escape it here, but Ms. Mulligan, in an earth-shattering performance, never seems anything less than as truly vulnerable and lonely as Kyra herself must be.

            Mr. Nighy, meanwhile, steals the show as far as it can be stolen, with an exact, exacting performance as a man drowning in his own unhappiness.  It reminded me of nothing, strangely, so much as Michael Cera’s turn earlier this year as Warren Straub in This is Our Youth—another portrait of a neurotic, lonely rich man who does something drastic in looking for love.  Like Mr. Cera’s, Mr. Nighy’s performance doesn’t just capture the important bits of Tom’s soul (though this it does brilliantly—when Tom begins to cry, the collective heart of the audience breaks instantly), it also captures the little, less noticeable ones; namely, the tics that make up a person’s character.  Tom kicks his chair incessantly, wipes his knee with his elbow, smooths back his hair and rubs the corners of his mouth—the actions of a man desperately trying to maintain cleanliness and order in the face of the dirty, chaotic world of grief and uncertainty that awaits him outside Kyra’s apartment.  The compliment I would most like to give to Mr. Nighy, Mr. Beard, Ms. Mulligan, and Mr. Hare himself is that on that stage, Tom, Edward, and Kyra are not characters; they are real people.  And as simple as that may seem to achieve on the stage, take my word for it—it’s the hardest thing in the world.